Citations de Joyce Wieland [en anglais]

« I really think there is a female aesthetic. [...] It feels different to be a woman, so naturally the films are going to be different. »
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)

« When Anthology Films came into existence in New York, which was a place to collect classics of the New Cinema as well as world cinema, the founders of it were the same men who judged which films were classics and which weren't. Naturally they got a selection of the male Structuralists and didn't choose any films made by women. Since their policy was never to give out reasons of choice or rejection, I never had a clue, and had to surmise that none of my works were classics. [...] The whole thing I am talking about made me very strong because I left it behind. It is no different than what has happened to many other women. It is really a wonder that any women filmmakers have managed to survive. »
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)

Citations sur Joyce Wieland [en anglais]

« I was so struck by the way Joyce [Wieland's] films stayed alive. They have a conceptual richness that can't be ascribed to just one historical moment. There's a humor that runs through her work, but also a sense of excess and exuberance--a joy in the body, in flesh and in light. »
-- Kay Armatage
(source)

« Despite her critical and interpersonal entanglements in the structural film initiative, Wieland characteristically fashioned an idiosyncratic position that could simultaneously borrow from, critique, and transcend stylistic prerogatives identified with each camp. »
-- Paul Arthur
(source)

« Joyce Wieland's films elude easy categorization. The body of work as a
whole is varied -- there are films of a formal nature, and others which are
less so. Several are political, concerned with technology, ecology, and her
native land, Canada. Her films are informed by her involvement in other,
more directly tactile art forms -- painting, drawing, construction -- and in crafts such as quilting. »
-- Regina Cornwell
(source)

« The relaxation of the rigours of structural filmmaking in [Joyce] Wieland's films is indicated in the way her work often includes anecdotes, symbols and sentimental references. More important still is her use of diverse materials, including representational imagery, written texts and surface infractions -- patterns created by perforating the film. »
-- R. Bruce Elder
(source)

« [Joyce] Wieland's complete filmic archives were donated to the Cinémathèque québécoise following her death in 1998. With her film distributor, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution [Centre] (CFMDC), a DVD compilation entitled The Complete Works of Joyce Wieland was produced in 2011 that brings together sixteen shorts and two feature films that Wieland produced in her lifetime. As an unfinished film, Wendy and Joyce is not among these eighteen films, but a rough assembly and some disparate film and sound elements labelled 'Wendy and Joyce' are housed at the Cinémathèque, while her paper-based notes and sound elements are held in the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. »
-- Monika Kin Gagnon
(source)

« An internationally acclaimed painter and filmmaker, [Joyce Wieland] was the first
female living artist to have a solo show at the National Gallery of Canada
and at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Wieland was a major figure in the
avant-garde film scene of the 1960s and '70s and, together with Michael
Snow, was one of the founders of Canadian experimental cinema. She
may also be the first underground filmmaker to make the transition to the
commercial film industry and was certainly only one of a handful of women
feature-film directors in Canada at that time. »
-- Barbara Goslawski
(source)

« By deliberately choosing to glorify the materials accessible to the shut-in housewife, [Joyce] Wieland has found a space to breathe. Cats, mice, the kitchen table and sink, teacups and teapots are all a part of her repertoire. Wearing the nametags that have been lavished upon her -- most significantly, 'the ultimate feminine artist' -- Wieland admits that domestic trappings have provided a strength for her work. »
-- Debbie Magidson and Judy Wright
(source)

« Consistently employing materials and themes linked to the private sphere of women's experiences, Joyce Wieland's films introduce the identity politic so crucial to the exploration of sexual difference in feminist films of the 1970s and 1980s. »
-- Janine Marchessault
(source)

« Unlike some of the work within [the experimental film] tradition, [Joyce] Wieland does not resort to pure abstraction, to a complete denial of reference. Nor, however, does she surrender to mainstream expression. Wieland's self-reflexivity is not only a 'device' to explore the nature of cinema. She makes the viewer aware of the filmmaking process in order to sharpen perception for a greater end. Wieland's work is indeed about film, but also considers concrete political issues. It is not a cinema only of itself; it is rather a cinema that is aware of the society that gave it birth. »
-- Lianne M. McLarty
(source)

« By exploring relationships between language, text and image, by increasingly using that relationship for exploring narrativity, [Joyce] Wieland's development in experimental films prefigures the cinematic work of such feminist filmmakers as Yvonne Rainer and Babette Mangolte. Wieland's films offer feminist solutions for integrating materials, processes and themes that resolutely emphasize formal manipulations of subjective screen space, point of view and temporality. Through its exploration of political, formal and conceptual options, Wieland's work becomes an important link in the feminist artistic heritage. »
-- Lauren Rabinovitz
(source)

« [In Pierre Vallières (1972), Joyce] Wieland focuses entirely on the lips of an eloquent separatist, echoing and expanding her paintings of lips, several of which (West 4th, 1963) in themselves echoed film strips. In fact, her oeuvre is notable for its wholeness. Those circles and lips (and those circular lips) can be found not only in the paintings and in Pierre Vallières, but in the other films as well -- in the feature The Far Shore (1976), when the hero and heroine silently mouth words to each other through magnifying glasses, and in Water Sark (1965), where domestic items on a kitchen table are presented with reverence and are filmed through glasses of water, and in Reason over Passion (1969), in which Wieland mouths the national anthem, and most of all in Birds at Sunrise (shot in 1972, completed in 1986), which literally sees through a circle -- Wieland photographed birds through cardboard tubes [...] and in the process exalted them, both sensually and spiritually, in a fashion that recalls O'Keefe's canonization of flowers. »
-- Jay Scott
(source)

« Joyce Wieland's films gather together what matters -- matters of heart, home and country, in a language of flesh and of roses, a language of love. Her concern is to make an ecological vision, one that has respect for all things, what matters: plant matter, animals, people, history, politics, art, the landscape itself. »
-- Leila Sujir
(source)

« One truth [Joyce Wieland's] films came to share with the experimental filmmakers of the mid-1960s is that the film viewer's position is the paradoxical one of the intimate outsider. Wieland often explores this outsider's place in the film process, as she does for example with the close-up mirrored mise en scène of Water Sark (1964-1965) and the shot/countershot flow of A and B in Ontario (shot in the 1960s but only completed in 1984). But just as Wieland often prefers to border her serial works dealing with disasters with a soft, tactile frame, her films often emphasize the frame line to help position the spectator outside the spectacle. This is not so much an exclusion as it is a welcoming into intimacy on this side of the viewfinder. »
-- Bart Testa
(source)

RABINOVITZ, Lauren. « After the Avant-Garde: Joyce Wieland and New Avant-Gardes in the 1970s »
,
dans Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71, 2nd ed., Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2003, pp. 184-215.
[en anglais]